The 25th Anniversary Performance Series and Mission Creek Music Festival

Introduced four years ago, the Collision series highlights cross-disciplinary performance: musicians and sound artists in collaboration with visual artists working in video, film, dance, theater, and other media arts. The results consistently challenge, stimulate, and surprise audiences with an eye and ear for current local and international experimental music and performance.

Building upon our commitment to infuse local arts with outside voices and foster connections among international artist communities, The Lab and Mission Creek Music & Arts Festival is proud to showcase five performers from Sweden at this year's Collision Festival: Nim, MAG, Christian Pallin, Curly Lou, and The Toilet. In addition, Koloni from Sweden will DJ every night of Collision.

darwinsbitch is fluid forms of drones, doomy laments, and folk melodies fleshed out from a backbone of sine oscillators and violin. Sound sources from the environment blend with instruments such as piano, ocean-harp, guitar, bass, and specially designed computer programs to create a unique sonic hybrid between the acoustic and the digital

0th are the female fourtet and previously renouned founding members of Zeek Sheck, Triangle, Mahjongg, and Bones. Now as fourfold cipher, spying from bottomless wells, the spider-eyed spinner of rhythm synthesis in plangent bass, distaff of drums, colored by synth, and lashed to filaments of vox, 0th are the feminine source, unbolted infinites, the ouroboros of computing machinery. Theirs is the force of nature encrypted in sleep of science fiction and reality.

Nim creates ambient soundtracks (with cassette walkmans as the sole instrumentation) to black and white images culled from found super 8 recordings. By manipulating the walkmans mechanically, whilst distorting the signals through guitar effect pedals, he plays with repetition and distortion in both sound and imagery. The format can be described as a live music video that takes the audience on a melancholy journey through time.

ANIMALIA is a lyrical performance with movement, projections and live music on singing saw, accordion and strings. Performed within a landscape of mesmerizing video and archival film, Animalia invokes visions of secret bee societies and haunted circus scenes. The performance offers metaphors of flight as departure points from environmental collapse and the hallucinatory effects of war. By appropriating the masculine power symbol of the buck 'rack' and reinserting it onto feminine characters, the narrative blurs the divisions between masculine/feminine identity and human/animal forms.more info: http://www.carolynrydercooley.com/performance.htmlvideo: http://www.vimeo.com/5161326

MAG works with live samplings of trombone, megaphone guitar, sound and noise around her. Since 1995 she has been involved in many different bands such as Surplus People, Good Morning Sweden, Maggot and Jurassic Jesus and has toured extensively throughout Scandinavia and in Europe.

Ann will present songs and spoken word pieces from the past, present and future in recital with L.A.-based musician Alexander Rannie on harp.

Ann Magnuson is a Los Angeles-based actress, singer, writer and performance artist working in a myriad of media including TV, film and on stage in theatres, festivals, cabarets and art spaces around the world. She has performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Whitney Museum of American Art (where she performed her 5-hour “Tribute to Muzak” in the museum’s elevator), the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, NYSF/The Public Theater and Joe's Pub; the Hammer Museum, REDCAT, LACE and The Steve Allen Theater; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum; Walker Art Center, Andy Warhol Museum, and in theaters, clubs and art galleries worldwide.photo of Ann Magnuson by Rocky Schenck

Curly Lou has been reinterpreting Swedish popular music from 1920-40's since 2005. Working in the borderland between music and the history of cinema, she's been able to catch the feeling and sound of this era and bring it to life today. The repertoire is a cultural heritage,both timeless and modern. She has previously performed in France, Spain and Italy. In Sweden, she has performed at cultural institutions as well as at theaters and clubs including Swedish Museum of Modern Art, the Culture Centre, Göteborg Konsthall, Röda Sten, Orionteatern, Atalante, Klubb Berlin, and Klubb Koloni. Besides being an artist, she's a project manager for several historical film projects in Stockholm and Göteborg.

Zachary James Watkins' Suite For String Quartet is written specifically for resonant spaces, interactive electronics, audience participation and string quartet. Suite for String Quartet has been in a continuous state of "revision" since Christmas 2004. For this current version I have developed a new tuning for all 16 strings. Each string of the quartet is retuned to an odd number partial of 60Hz. Seattle artist Joseph Gray will perform live improvised video animation. Please feel free to explore the space, move quickly, move slowly, make subtle movements, dance! Listen to the unique characteristics of the space and the sounds being performed by the loud speakers, strings players and each other!

Jim Haynes manifests a broken minimalism whose magnetic drones give the impression of timelessness, when in fact the environment is quite active. Drawing from shortwave radio static, electric field disturbances, controlled feedback manipulation, and numerous textural scrapings, this engineering of disparate materials and media seeks to evince the unpredictability of decay, to manifest its potential for a rough hewn beauty, and to bare witness to its inevitability.

The Toilet creates his music by using recycled sound material, once used and then forgotten by previous musicians and artists. The old sounds are picked out from the bad conscience of music, torn into pieces by the Toilet to be reshaped into new sparkling music. This process of recycling creates a feeling of familiarity between the music and the audience as they pick up on recognizable sounds. Through the quick pace and sharp turns of the music feelings of nostalgia and long lost memories develops while before their eyes The Toilet dances, a happy bloody clown, free from the norms, quilt and ideals of the society to whom he performs.

* Collision was made possible by the generous support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.